SIGGRAPH Will Go In-Depth On The Making of ‘Incredibles 2’

Itching to know everything about how Pixar made Incredibles 2? Your best bet is to attend this year’s SIGGRAPH conference, taking place in Vancouver from August 12-16.

The conference will offer at least eight different panels about the creation of the Brad Bird film, featuring over two dozen creative and technical crew who worked on the film.

SIGGRAPH is a high-level professional event, so many of the panels will focus on specific technical areas of the film’s production, such as how the characters’ clothes were “tailored” and shaded, how the studio used motion blending and motion capture for crowd simulations, how “interactive full-fidelity” hair was achieved, and new approaches to skin simulation used in the film.

Another interesting sounding panel – “Reinterpreting memorable characters in Incredibles 2 — will explore how the characters evolved in the new film to “deliver on qualities that couldn’t be achieved on the first Incredibles,” while still staying true to the essence of the original characters.

Here’s a look at the Incredibles 2 panels that’ll be taking place at SIGGRAPH:

A major design goal of Incredibles 2 was to add greater details to the characters’ clothes than in the original film. Two methods that helped us achieve this were Bump-To-Roughness to help preserve finer illumination details in the clothing, and curve procedurals to add realism to the garment shading.
– Trent Crow, Junyi Ling, Michael Kilgore

This talk describes how Pixar’s character tailoring and shading teams created the fashionable costumes of Incredibles 2, collaborating with many departments. We dressed a large number of distinctive characters for both the Civilian and Super worlds, and found a balance between stylized yet realistic form, shading, and movement.
– Aimei Kutt, Fran Kalal, Trent Crow, Beth Albright

Robustly simulating the dynamics of skin sliding over a character’s body is an ongoing challenge. We have found that many problems can be addressed by performing 2D ray-tracing over the surface of the mesh. The approach is fast and robust, and has been used successfully in Incredibles 2.
– Ryan Kautzman, Gordon Cameron Theodore

The stylized world of Incredibles 2 features large urban crowds both in everyday situations and panicked mayhem. To meet this challenge, Pixar’s crowds team developed a system to automatically approximate our complex rigs with skinned skeletons, opening up our pipeline to procedural look-ats, motion blending, ragdoll physics, and motion capture.
– Paul Kanyuk, Patrick Coleman, Jonah B. Laird

On Incredibles, we leaned on 2D drawing and design techniques to drive the way we modeled and rigged. For Incredibles 2 we strove to redesign the characters to deliver on qualities that couldn’t be achieved on the first Incredibles, while still staying true to the essence of these legacy characters.
– Nancy Tsang, Jacob Speirs, Rich Hurrey, Salvatore Melluso, Mark Piretti, Lou Hamou-Lhadj, Kevin Singleton